Freezing Order: A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, Murder,and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

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Lawyers, politicians and the usual useful idiots have all been successfully recruited to the Russian cause, either through financial inducement, bribery, bovine anti-west sentiments, or perhaps worst of all, complacency. A few minutes later, the senior officer who’d presented the charge sheet re-entered the room, translator in tow, both with heads bowed. Eventually, though, I got lost in the maze-like streets and squares, and had to hail a cab to take me back to the hotel. With the inevitable delays, I was looking at a minimum of six months of sitting in a sweltering Spanish jail before I was either released or sent to Russia.

The truck driver eventually emerged from a nearby building, saw the police car’s flashing lights, and moved his vehicle out of the way. If something like this ever happens again,” she said, “and you can’t reach anyone, post it on Twitter. Bill’s courage, determination and tenacity with creating and putting the Magnitsky Act into action are truly remarkable.When Putin came to power on New Year’s Eve 1999, promising to stamp out corruption, Browder was a relieved man. Fast paced and engaging, Browder’s book reads like a spy novel, but it also makes a powerful and remarkably prescient case for the need to use all the legal and financial tools available to separate Putin’s financiers from their foreign-held bank accounts and luxury yachts. In terms of western relations with Vladimir Putin, Bill Browder has performed the role of the canary in the coalmine – or perhaps goldmine would be more fitting. It asks what one person can do in the face of such insidious corruption, and what we can find in ourselves to stand up and resist those forces that would steal, deceive and murder for their own gain. Bill Browder takes us down the rabbit hole of Kremlin lawfare where down is up and wrong is right, and powerful Russian interests are trying to upend our legal and political systems.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Photograph: Mikhail Voskresenskiy/Reuters View image in fullscreen Mourners at the funeral of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, Moscow, 2009. A dark blue sign reading POLICIA stuck out from the side of a weathered stone-and-redbrick building. There was a dining room, its table laid out with pastries, chocolates, and champagne on ice; then came the reading room, with a small private library; then a lounge with a glass-topped bar; then a little office with subdued lighting; and finally, the bedroom, which had a freestanding bathtub tucked under a high window. As Browder and his team tracked the money as it flowed out of Russia through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas, they were shocked to discovered that Vladimir Putin himself was a beneficiary of the crime.Browder’s account of how he stood up to Putin in the face of danger, arrest warrants, and bullying is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the tactics of modern autocracy. He led me to his office, where I told him the story about Sergei Magnitsky, my Russian lawyer, that I’d told so many times before. It is among a crop of excellent recent books about Russia…If its subject matter weren’t so grave, the book could be said to have all the elements of a high-octane drama.

I’d started using Twitter a couple of years earlier, and now had some 135,000 followers, many of them journalists, government officials, and politicians from around the world. Every news outlet—ABC, Sky News, the BBC, CNN, Time, the Washington Post—all of them wanted to know what was going on. In these years, Browder made a fortune, turning Hermitage into the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia.At first he’s not sure if the Spanish police are in fact Russian agents in disguise, and then he’s not sure if he will be held and extradited to Moscow – where he would likely have met the same end as his lawyer. They then blamed the scam on Browder, and when his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, exposed the officers responsible for the fraud, those same officers had Magnitsky arrested. It’s a fear that Alexandre Dumas and Alfred Hitchcock tapped into to dramatic effect, but what is most troubling here is how acquiescent the western establishment has been to Russian crimes and lies. Perhaps the story of one very wealthy man going up against the Russian state seems indulgent against the backdrop of the nightmare unfolding in Ukraine.

I was either being kidnapped or arrested, but the world outside was oblivious, enjoying a day of sightseeing. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.He stepped aside when the doors opened, making room for me to exit first, but once we were in the hall he shuffled past me, stopping in front of a white door. Being Ukrainian, It certainly gives me a deep understanding what it means to go through all the struggles working in russia and then wrestling its criminal ways of existence for many years. I had been subjected to dozens of death threats, and had even been warned several years earlier by a US government official that an extrajudicial rendition was being planned for me.